Art review: 'Tony Berlant' at L.A. Louver Gallery

Museum retrospectives are best when they let you see what great artists were up to before they got great, often stumbling through awkward phases that shed light on their breakthroughs.

“Tony Berlant: Works from 1962-1964” cuts to the chase by zooming in on the years leading up to the artist’s discovery of printed tin as his main material. Over the last 48 years, the 70-year-old artist has transformed cut-and-nailed tin into fluid fusions of abstraction and representation, unexpectedly elegant compositions that maintain their clunky materiality.

At L.A. Louver Gallery, eight wall works, made of clothing, paint and wood or metal, surround a single free-standing sculpture, made of the same materials. The wall pieces belong to a body of work that has not been exhibited since Berlant’s 1963 solo debut, at David Stuart Gallery.

All are blunt and mean business, like a snub-nosed pistol or tugboat. To the snappy graphics of advertising, they add the heft of flesh and the necessity of engaging the world concretely — not idealistically or generically, but face-to-face, up-close, in person.

Berlant’s house-shaped sculpture, titled “Sandy,” wraps this point-blank immediacy around a toy-like form that doesn’t let you stand still. It’s a pivotal piece that marks the beginning of a career that has never rested on its accomplishments and never forgotten where it started.

-- David Pagel

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., (310) 822-4955, through Oct. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lalouver.com.

Image: Tony Berlant, "Sue," 1963; Credit: Courtesy of L.A. Louver

Art review: David Jien at Richard Heller Gallery

David Jien’s solo debut takes visitors into a world filled with adventure, danger and sex. Old-fashioned romance simmers beneath the surfaces of the 30-year-old’s super-cool drawings, suffusing their action-packed dramas with unexpected tenderness. 

At Richard Heller Gallery, 15 page-size works on paper, two large landscapes and a scroll-scale panorama tell Jien’s life story — not literally, like so much of the self-infatuated navel-gazing that digital technology makes possible, but with a more generous, user-friendly mix of poetic license, youthful excess, dreamy passion and labor-intensive devotion.

Jien treats the facts of his biography — first-generation Taiwanese American, veteran tagger who spent time in jail and recent art school graduate — as raw material for the fantastic stories that unfold in his pictures. Titled “The Plight of the Who,” his exhibition gives form to a home-grown cosmology in which a band of animal-headed renegades on horseback battles legions of tiger-riding reptiles and blue, bubble-headed automatons. At stake is the fate of a newborn babe, not to mention life as it’s known in Jien’s imaginary land.

Inspired by such disparate sources as Nintendo, Persian miniatures, Chinese scrolls, Homer, Chaucer, Stanley Kubrick, Roald Dahl, Henry Darger and Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jien’s art brings far-flung elements into a form-savvy epic that is familiar and formidable and a thrill to get lost in.

-- David Pagel

Richard Heller Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Oct. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.richardhellergallery.com.

Image: David Jien, "The Who Riders," Credit: Richard Heller Gallery

 

Art review: 'Robert Irwin, Way Out West' at L&M Arts

Robert Irwin may not have the most works in the most shows affiliated with Pacific Standard Time. But he’s arguably the most important artist in the Getty-sponsored initiative. Art in California, and around the world, would not look the way it does today if not for Irwin, who has been exhibiting his influential paintings, sculptures and installations for 55 years.

It all started in 1957. Just after the 29-year-old had finished hanging his first solo show at Felix Landau Gallery, he got a good, clear look at his abstract paintings and knew, in his heart, that they were terrible: perfectly respectable in appearance but too arbitrary to satisfy his need for something fundamental, spot-on, no-nonsense.

Since then, Irwin has made series after series of groundbreaking works, each defying expectations and expanding art’s possibilities by stimulating the senses, challenging the intellect and stirring the soul. Some are better than others, but none is gratuitous. The best compel you to zero in on the physical facts of your perceptions, whose riveting intensity gives way to a sense of expansive serenity. Kind of like magic, but with no trickery.

At L&M Arts, nine new works show the 83-year-old artist at his best: coaxing phenomenal beauty out of little more than thin air while making every second matter.

Art review: Kristin Calabrese and others at Susanne Vielmetter

Kristin Calabrese, Monique van Genderen and Mindy Shapero make works that blur boundaries. The hard lines that divide comedy from tragedy, art from craft and corny from cool dissolve in their multilayered pieces, which skip across styles and subjects with panache and purpose.

In the first gallery at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, seven paintings by Calabrese play fast and loose with illusionism. Mixing signals like nobody’s business, her tromp l’oeil circle of Band-Aids and square of raw wood turn flat surfaces into mysterious spaces. Two self-portraits show Calabrese with spaghetti tangled in her hair and standing on one leg with a potted plant atop her head. Goofiness gives way to evocations of Medusa and ancient Egyptian goddesses while never leaving the nuttiness behind.

 The next two galleries offer an impressive inventory of Van Genderen’s abstract paintings. On canvas, clear vinyl and glazed clay, the artist’s 15 small, large and installation-scale works combine the jaunty optimism of decorative abstraction with the grungy funkiness of repurposed objects. Visually, it’s a cocktail with a kick. And it sticks with you.

In the last gallery, Shapero’s three pieces look as if they were made by three different artists. Her delicately stenciled drawing, monstrous mosaic sculpture and loopy gold-leafed panel treat various media as switch-hitting team players who do double-duty as shape-shifting renegades.

The spirit of anything-goes ingenuity animates this triple-header of an exhibition, which delivers the goods on many levels.

-- David Pagel

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 6006 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 837-2117, ends Saturday. www.vielmetter.com

 
Image: Kristin Calabrese, "Blending In," 2011 Credit: Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Art review: 'Rear Window' at Patrick Painter Inc.

“Rear Window: Brought to You in High-Def” is a summer group show that has only the slimmest connection to Alfred Hitchcock’s film. One link between the 1954 movie and the 11 works in the 10-artist show at Patrick Painter Inc., nearly all of which date from the 1990s, is the fact that both were made with cameras by artists famous in their fields.

“Rear Window” is in color, as are half of the prints in the exhibition. These range from John Baldessari’s lushly tinted prints to Jean-Luc Mylayne’s snapshot-style pictures of birds to Ed Ruscha’s studio shot of a shiny car part, its grays and silvers suggesting black-and-white masterpieces.

Several photographs depict women, including Catherine Opie’s sun-bleached shot of domestic tranquillity on the rocks, Christopher Williams’ wannabe fashion ad and Dennis Adams’ subtly disturbing series of 26 portraits of Patricia Hearst, from child to bride and a whole lot between.

A row of windows, shrouded in shadow, is the focus of Craigie Horsfield’s richly textured C-print. However, the most resonant connections between the classic movie and the contemporary images are the least literal: a sense of mystery, memory’s capacity for distortion and the mind’s desire to find relationships where none may be.

Misperception, misinterpretation and the mistakes these miscues lead to is one of Hitchcock’s great themes. They are integral to Mike Kelley’s series of 34 playfully captioned stalactites and stalagmites. They also play a role in Reinhard Mucha’s nostalgia-tinged diptych and Juan Muñoz’s four small photos, which reveal the secrets behind a magic trick while maintaining just a hint of enigma.

At its best, that’s how the show works: Starting with a mad proposition, it gets in your head and doesn’t let you rest.

-- David Pagel

Patrick Painter Inc., 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through Sept. 16, Closed Sundays and Mondays, www.patrickpainter.com

Image: Dennis Adams, "Patricia Hearst, A thru Z," 1979-1990. Credit: Patrick Painter Inc.

Art review: Eight artists at Gagosian Gallery

 
 
An untitled exhibition at Gagosian Gallery invites visitors to improvise. That’s a nice shift in emphasis.

In America, artists are often called upon to do the improvisatory work. Viewers are meant to sit back and follow the moves the artists have made. In this eight-artist exhibition, the tables are turned: You’re responsible for making meaning — for creating connections, cultivating relationships and construing poetry among the 13 works.

One of the best things about the exhibition is that it doesn’t require you to make sense of every piece. Pleasure — not completion or thoroughness or inclusivity — is the point of improvisation, and some of the most satisfying instances leave out more than they include. Quality and quantity often work at cross-purposes.

Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds,” Pierre Huyghe’s “Les Grandes Ensembles” and Yayoi Kusama’s “Passing Winter” stand out for their efficiency. With startling clarity, casual virtuosity and graceful savvy, these Pop masterpieces compress loads of emotional complexity into simple setups. All make you happy to be alive — not only alert to your surroundings but in tune with the invisible rhythms pulsing through them.

Warhol’s 26 helium-filled sculptures, drifting around a gallery, break Minimalism’s stranglehold on heavy-duty significance by making a virtue of lightweight materials, airy reveries and cheap artifice.

Huyghe’s black-and-white video, projected in a darkened gallery and accompanied by a dramatic score, depicts a pair of modern apartment towers on a stormy night. Various lights in various windows go on and off, sometimes slowly, as if in real time, and at other times swiftly and in unison with others, as if composed by the artist. Playing the beauty of randomness against the beauty of meticulously arranged patterns, this mesmerizing piece occupies a world big enough for both.

In the next gallery, Kusama’s sculpture is a mirrored box with two or three peepholes in each of its sides and on its top. The magic happens when you look into one of the openings and see that what’s inside takes up infinitely more space than what’s outside, where you happen to be standing. Turning the world inside out, Kusama’s accessible piece makes your body shrink and your mind expand as it conveys the sensation of an out-of-body experience.

The other works, by Aaron Curry, Carsten Holler, Richard Wright and collaborators Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, function like planets that orbit the trio of suns. They elaborate on experiences delivered by Warhol, Huyghe and Kusama, allowing visitors to customize our improvisations.

-- David Pagel 

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Sept. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.gagosian.com

Images, from top: Yayoi Kusama’s “Passing Winter”; Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds." Credit: Gagosian Gallery

Art Review: 'will be home...' at Ambach & Rice

 
Ambach & Rice has moved from Seattle to Los Angeles. Its inaugural exhibition, “will be home…,” features works by 11 gallery artists. The ensemble holds together nicely, neither shoehorning misfits into restrictive categories nor leaving so many loose ends that you wonder how it fits together.

Nearly every piece conveys a sense of not being at home with itself — of doubting, almost existentially, its wholeness, coherence and groundedness in the world.

Roy McMakin’s three pieces of furniture look as if they’re too unstable to function on a day-to-day basis. But his chairs are as comfortable as traditionally designed ones, and far more intellectually stimulating. Along with a small pedestal table, they drive a wedge between comfort and complacency, uniting bodies and minds in sympathetic endeavors.

Martina Sauter’s three collaged photographs and Abigail Reynolds’ four collages do something similar with found and fabricated images. Each cuts and pastes together parts so that it’s hard to know where one scenario ends and another begins. The slippery relationship between pictures and things also takes playful shape in “Bulwark,” Ron van der Ende’s abstract wall-relief made of salvaged wood.

The question of what’s real and what’s fake animates Ellen Lesperance’s bittersweet diptych, Jeffry Mitchell’s pair of ceramic figurines and Karen Sargsyan’s two paper sculptures, whose silly realism is timely.

Visual conundrums energize Pablo Pijnappel’s illogical photographs, Alon Levin’s stacked sculpture and Grant Barnhart’s two paintings, “Nonsense No Longer Breeds Pink Concrete” and “Tolerable Garden Strap.”

Eric Yahnker’s two big drawings pay cheeky homage to many precedents, including William Burroughs, John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Peter Alexander and Joe Goode. Yahnker’s homemade pictures marry snide skepticism and hometown favoritism, a loaded mix that is not unique to Los Angeles but at home the world over.

-- David Pagel

Ambach & Rice, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 965-5500, www.ambachandrice.com, ends Sat.

Image: Installation view of 'will be home...,' with work by Roy McMakin, Martina Sauter, and Ron van der Ende. Credit: Ambach & Rice 

Art review: Lesley Vance at David Kordansky Gallery

This post has been corrected. See note below.

Lesley Vance’s dense little paintings are jam-packed with contradictions. That may be maddening for people who like their art to be logical and consistent, like arguments and contracts. But paintings are neither. And that’s exactly why Vance’s works are so fascinating.

At David Kordansky Gallery, her 13 oils on linen and eight watercolors seem to contain more space, movement and light-swallowing emptiness than their dimensions allow. The biggest measures less than 20-by-15-inches. It appears to present three fragments of three broken images — all suspended in velvety blackness — alongside what might be a magnified detail of the fragment on the right.

Its format recalls maps within maps, schematic diagrams that use shifts in scale to provide the right balance between details and overviews. Vance’s mastery of scale-shifts gives her abstract pictures the capacity to teeter-totter between tightly focused close-ups and distant, big-picture perspectives.

Many of her sumptuously painted works have an eye-to-the-keyhole atmosphere. Yet they never evoke anything illicit. In some, highlights recall klieg lights in the night sky. Others resemble the flickering beams of flashlights, just before the batteries die.

Both intimate and impenetrable, vibrant and icy, Vance’s paintings make strange bedfellows of their influences. Some borrow Caravaggio’s sumptuous browns, inky blacks and glowing golds, along with his capacity to muster mystery from the darkest of shadows.  Others steal from Dali, taking the sensation that they depict an actual world, exactly as it appears in the artist’s imagination. And others riff off of Arthur Dove, suffusing themselves with the feeling that they are boiled-down distillations of reality’s essentials.

As demanding as they are satisfying, Vance’s paintings do not suffer fools.

-- David Pagel

Lesley Vance, David Kordansky Gallery, 3143 S. La Cienega Blvd., Unit A, (310) 558-3030, through Aug. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.davidkordanskygallery.com

 Image: Lesley Vance, "Untitled," 2011. Credit: David Kordansky Gallery

[Updated, Aug. 2 at 4:08 p.m: The image is from 2011. An earlier version of this post had the incorrect year.]

Art review: 'Jack Youngerman' at Margo Leavin Gallery

At Margo Leavin Gallery, “Jack Youngerman: 150 Small Works on Paper” is a visual treat that shouldn’t be missed.

It’s the 85-year-old New Yorker’s second solo show in Los Angeles. His first was 46 years ago. More important, Youngerman’s survey of iPad-size abstractions, from 1953 to 2006, makes it easy for visitors to see his mind in action — making choices, following hunches and responding to unexpected developments as his skills and interests evolve from one decade to the next.

The size of the show and the size of its works make this possible. Standing in one spot, you can see, very clearly, eight works at once. It’s a little like being in front of a large, high-definition computer monitor, on which you can arrange and rearrange dozens of images. But it’s a lot better in the flesh, where variations in texture, tone and temperature are more evident and meaningful than they are digitally.

Youngerman’s handmade abstractions are all about physicality. They invite you to see and savor every micro-millimeter of acrylic, every ghostly trace of graphite, every matte expanse of gouache, every rough edge and smooth contour. Their materials, which include light-absorbing ink, super-saturated watercolors, cut paper, cardboard and wood, add a human dimension to their designs, which are bold, punchy and dynamic as well as goofy, off-center and nutty.

The show has not been installed chronologically, so comparisons and contrasts happen organically. Shapes and colors in various pieces echo off of patterns and formats in others. These links form clusters and constellations in the mind’s eye, where stories begin to unfold. The more time you spend, the more you see.

Art review: Matt Lipps at Marc Selwyn Fine Art

Pictures are not what they used to be. Neither are people.

Digital technology is largely the reason, mostly because it has increased the number of images people see and decreased the amount of time we look at each one. Artists are also responsible, often in ways that rely on digital technology but fly in the face of its standard operating procedures.

At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Matt Lipps’ large-format Cibachromes throw a monkey wrench into the perceptual systems of viewers weaned on the Internet. To see his 11 wonderfully disjunctive photographs is to fall into a world where 24/7 connectivity and need-to-know-now instantaneity lose their stranglehold.

On first glance, Lipps’ pictures look pretty slick. Each shows a tastefully composed cluster of people, sculptures, buildings and banners, the mix made up of modern masterpieces from 20^th century Europe and icons from ancient Greece, Africa and the Middle East.

A closer look reveals that Lipps’ images are not collages. Each depicts a diorama-sized stage, complete with tinted spotlights, matching backdrops, variously scaled props and mind-boggling shadows. The stars of Lipps’ mini photo-shoots are paper doll-style figures that he has cut out of an encyclopedia-style bimonthly publication that was popular in the United States from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. The low-tech, DIY skill-set is endearing. It’s also effective.